The Road to the Sun

Stonehenge in your City can help you find nearby streets which are aligned with the sunrise or sunset on the winter or summer solstice. The site has mapped out hundreds of cities around the world highlighting the streets which face towards sunrise or sunset during either solstice.

Streets which point towards sunrise are marked in yellow on the map and the streets which align with sunset are marked in red.

We have only just passed the summer solstice so you could use the map to capture your own Manhattanhenge moment. Twice a year the setting sun aligns with the east–west streets in Manhattan in New York City, providing a great photo opportunity for anyone who wants to snap the sun setting/rising at the end of a Manhattan street. You could use this map to capture a sunset or sunrise at the end of one of your local streets.


NYCHenge is a CartoDB map that allows you to find the direction of the sunset for any location in New York for any day. The east-west facing streets in New York's grid pattern are displayed in red on the map and the direction towards the sunset is displayed with a white poly-line. It is therefore a simple matter to find your location on the map and find out if the direction towards the sunset aligns with a specific street.



VeloViewer has created an interactive map that allows you to view the road orientation for any district or city in the world. Using the map you can zoom in on any area of the world and a rose diagram displays the road orientation distribution within the current map bounds.

The map uses the underlying data for roads in OpenStreetMap to calculate the road direction patterns on the fly. This means that you can move the map around and zoom in or out on any location and the rose diagram will update to show the road direction distribution within the current map view.